Guest Speaker

Peter FitzSimons is a journalist with The Sydney Morning Herald and Sun-Herald. He is also a regular TV commentator, a former radio presenter (very successfully, with Mike Carlton on Radio 2UE) and is also a former national representative rugby union player.

Peter is the author of over 20 books – including Tobruk, Kokoda, Batavia, Mawson and the Ice Men of the Heroic Age and biographies of Nancy Wake‚ Kim Beazley‚ Nick Farr-Jones‚ Les Darcy, Steve Waugh and John Eales. His latest book Eureka Stockade – The Unfinished Revolution looks at the myths and facts behind the Victorian miners’ fight for their rights under the flag of the Southern Cross.

Peter is Australia’s biggest-selling non-fiction author of the last ten years.

Peter was named a Member of the Order of Australia for service to literature as a biographer, sports journalist and commentator, and to the community through contributions to conservation, disability care, social welfare and sporting organisations.

He lives with his wife, Lisa Wilkinson, and their three children in Sydney.

Archive:

Peter FitzSimons: Eureka – The Unfinished Revolution

New Date: Monday, 18 February at 6:00pm.For reasons beyond our control, this talk has been rescheduled to Monday 18/2 (was Tuesday 19/2). Please update your diaries accordingly. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

Launching SMSA’s new program of evening talks, Peter FitzSimons brings to life the 1854 battle at the Eureka Stockade, the events which caused it and changes to Australia’s societal fabric that occurred after the massacre.

In 1854, Victorian miners fought a deadly battle under the flag of the Southern Cross at the Eureka Stockade. Though brief and doomed to fail, the battle is legend in both our history and in the Australian mind. Henry Lawson wrote poems about it, its symbolic flag is still raised, and even the nineteenth-century visitor Mark Twain called it: “ a strike for liberty”.

Was this rebellion a fledgling nation’s first attempt to assert its independence under colonial rule? Or was it merely rabble-rousing by unruly miners determined not to pay their taxes?